Rachel Dovey, NORTH BAY BOHEMIAN
Nick Papadopoulos is a farmer now, but he has a professional background in conflict resolution. So, standing in a vegetable cooler on a Saturday night last March, surrounded by surplus produce that hadnt been sold, his mind began to wander.
"We had all this food that wasnt going to people," the general manager of Bloomfield Farms in Petaluma recalls. "Its edible and its grown for the purpose of feeding people, and we dont make any money when its wasted."
Later that week, he posted a message on Facebook advertising farmers market leftovers at a reduced price. That was the beginning of CropMobster.com, a social media hub addressing local farm waste and hunger—both issues hinging on a centralized, assembly-line food system that, according to Papadopoulos, is full of holes.